Evolving virtual representative spooks BPOs

TNN|

Dec 11, 2006, 02.51 AM IST

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One of the big threats to the $8.4-billion business process outsourcing industry is not that some other country will be able to take away the work from India but that virtual representatives (v-reps) might take up the jobs of a BPO agent.

V-reps are automated online personalities (software) that emulate the best in human customer service by providing personalised and immediate answers to customer questions via two-way natural language dialogue. Such v-reps could easily take up mundane call centre work like answering bank account queries, giving out travel information, product information and even answer some IT help desk queries.

For instance, Ford has been using a virtual service technician, named Ernie for the last few years to provide 24-hour internal technical support to technicians at various Ford dealerships in the US.

Virtual representatives can help Ford’s customers and employees find information faster than they can through alternative channels, such as phone or email while helping to reduce customer service and technical support costs.

The world’s largest call centre company, Convergys, sees a combination of human and v-reps answering queries in future. For instance, if a caller wants to register an address change the call can be handled by a virtual agent sitting on a server in the US.

On the other hand, if a caller wants to, say, get in-depth information on a new banking product or has a query that a v-rep cannot answer, then the query is escalated to a human agent, based out of its centre in Gurgaon.

Coca-Cola’s virtual agent named Hank can answer customer queries about the company’s product. The benefits of such agents are that they work round the clock, without a break and can replace thousands of human jobs.

Whether or not they are assigned human names, these v-reps are actually robots or, more specifically, human-relationship-emulating bots that are powered by artificial-intelligence software. NativeMinds, a manufacturer of automated customer-service agents in San Francisco, designs its bots to customer specifications.

Other companies creating virtual agents include Artificial Life Inc, Finali Corp and LifeFX Inc, to name a few. Of course, v-reps have a long way to go to entirely replace a human workforce. In the coming years more such agents will be employed to work along side humans, impacting at least some of the routine query handling jobs.